National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

> > > >
Color New!IIIF Color HighRes Gray HighRes PDF   Japanese English
0284 Across Asia : vol.1
Across Asia : vol.1 / Page 284 (Grayscale High Resolution Image)

New!Citation Information

doi: 10.20676/00000221
Citation Format: Chicago | APA | Harvard | IEEE

OCR Text

 

C. G. MANNERHEIM

supply of dry droppings will only suffice to boil our tea six times and it is impossible to collect any more now under the snow.

June 23rd.   The snow stopped this morning, but it is still cloudy and the wind has veered round to

Camp at the N. There are o.33 m of snow on the ground. Shooting is out of the question. The supply YavurKhar- of droppings will be exhausted to-morrow. We have been living on tea and rusks three times gan usun. a day. This morning Numgan rode out to try to find some bushes, but was uncertain whether he would reach them. Neither he nor the other Kalmuk will undertake to guide us from here until the snow melts. However, I must make the attempt to-morrow, for I have no time to spare.

I had intended to ride to the Jambe pass and draw a map of the highest reach of the river Yulduz which is indicated on the 4o verst map as coming from the Qaragai Tash dawan, but the snow prevented my doing so. A tributary of the Jambe usun or Yulduz comes from the Qaragai Tash dawan. It was dry at present, though there was plenty of water in the Jambe. Our camp was pitched on a tributary of the Kok-su, indicated on the map to the immediate W of the Qaragai Tash dawan as coming from the Jambe. According to the Kalmuks no water runs from the Jambe to the Kok-su, but it comes from the Öbyt dawan, a pass in the same mountains as the Jambe. This latter pass is between the Butun dawan in the E and the Öbyt dawan in the W. All three lead to the Great Dshirgalan. The Jambe is the most accessible of them. The mountains on the W of our camp on the other side of the river are called Yavur Khargan and the pass to the E of us is called Qaragai Tash dawan, Yavur Khargan or Kok-su dawan. It is insignificant.

June 24th.   There could be no doubt about the necessity of our leaving, for there was no sign in the

Camp at cold greyness of the morning of the thick snow beginning to melt. Under ordinary circum-

Iksä usun. stances the W slope of the Qaragai Tash pass is easy. It is only stony for one or two short stretches. To-day, however, the horses had no easy task in making their way upwards through the 33 cm of crusted snow. From here we took the same road as I described on the outward journey. The snow was just as thick until the Jambe usun debouched into the valley. Here the snowstorm had only lasted half a day instead of a day and a half as in the mountains. It was so severe, however, that the Torguts had not seen anything like it for years. The losses they have suffered are all the more serious as the population in this part of the valley appears to be very poor. At the foot of almost every yurt we saw frozen sheep which the Torguts now consumed in most cases. They spoke of several yurts in which more than half the herds of sheep had perished and others had lost horses, cows and young camels. After riding for ten hours we halted at three Kalmuk yurts close to the bank of the Jambe usun. Here it is called Iksä usun which means »the big river». The name seems almost ironical, for there was so little water that in the evening we were not able to fill an extra tea-kettle. Later in the summer, when the snow melts more rapidly in the mountains, there is enough water in the river to carry it to the marsh marked on the map. The beds of the rivers, dry at present, also help to raise the water in the Yulduz. With the exception of this time, when the snow melts, the bed of the Yulduz, about the middle

) 278